Machine.config is used for machine specific items – thus the name. It never get
moved from machine to machine. So that is where you put your connection
strings. Doing this you will never have the horror of realizing your QA team
has been hammering against your production data because someone forgot to
account for the web.config when it was moved DOWN from prod to back out a bad
release to QA (or whatever). And all your web.configs will be the same and easy
to promote when they do change.
You can also add a value to the
machine.config so that you can tell which environment you are in at
runtime.
So in my machine.config I added:
<appSettings>
<add key="ADEDevelopmentEnvironment" value="Yes"/>
</appSettings>
Then in my code I have:
If Not
String.IsNullOrEmpty(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings("ADEDevelopmentEnvironment"))
Then
Me.Label1.Text = "You are STILL in Dev?!!!"
Else
Me.Label1.Text = "You are on production"
End If